In short, we're doing quite well compared to many other carnivals who have gone extinct. This is especially true for science carnivals, of which CoE is the only active carnival listed on BlogCarnival.com.

The steady growth of CoE through time. "Fortunately, the number of posts has shown a steady upward curve, as indicated in the sixth graph, although not always at the one-blog-post-per-day rate set in the earliest days. However, over the past 20 Carnivals there has been an average of 1.06 blog posts cited per day of passing time, so we are certainly holding our own."

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.